The Russian government is shouting from every rooftop that their strategic red lines are about to be crossed, and that they will respond unless the U.S. and NATO start negotiating seriously. Yesterday’s expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry Board served as the forum for extensive comments about this by both President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Putin also spoke by phone on Dec. 21 with India’s Narendra Modi, Germany’s Olaf Scholz, and France’s Emmanuel Macron, and hammered on the same point with each of them. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also had blunt comments on the matter.
These developments are being widely covered by live Russian TV broadcasts, while they are by and large blacked out in the West, whose population continues to live in the Valley of the Clueless as the world careens towards another Cuban Missile Crisis.
TASS reported that, after listening to Shoigu’s report to the Defense Ministry Board, Putin stated: “They [the U.S.] simply do what they want [in other parts of the world]. But what they are doing on the territory of Ukraine now, or trying to do and going to do — this is not thousands of kilometers away from our national border. This is at the doorstep of our home. They must understand that we simply have nowhere to retreat further.”
Putin went on: “The United States does not possess hypersonic weapons yet, but we know when they will have them.… They will put hypersonic weapons in Ukraine, and then, under their cover — that does not mean that they will start using them tomorrow, because we already have Zircon [hypersonic missiles] and they do not — they will arm and push extremists from the neighboring state against Russia, including into certain regions of the Russian Federation, for example, Crimea, when they think circumstances are favorable.… Do they think we don’t see these threats? Or do they think that we are so weak-willed to simply look blankly at the threats posed to Russia? That is the problem: we simply have nowhere to move further, that’s the question,” Putin said.
